I was one of 12 winners in the Seriefest i Väst (a recent comics festival in Gothenburg) comics competition.
The themes were sustainability, good work conditions and equality, so I submitted this one:
Translation: ANGRY ANIMAL about SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION
“Sustainable consumption”?
Pha! That doesn’t even exist!
If you have an iPhone, it’s most definitely been built under slavery-like conditions. The same is probably true for any smartphone.
We in the West/North think that we need to have them, and many of us are ready to pay a whole lot of money for it, but that money will first and foremost go to profits for Apple and other corporations, not to whoever actually makes the products.
It’s the same with other electronics, clothes , shoes and whatever else people keep buying all the time. More or less anything we buy has been made for cheap in some other country and been shipped here.
Yes, I know that when people talk about sustainability, it’s not usually about work conditions. But what the hell, us humans are also part of the environment, aren’t we?
And yes, nature will also suffer from the cheap production since the main problem is that companies prioritize profits above any other concerns.
Sure, you can buy ecologic and so on, and that’s good even if it’s more expensive so only those with money can afford to take that responsibility.
And of course none of us should buy more food and stuff than we need, which should be obvious but obviously isn’t.
From all around us we get signals saying that more stuff will make us happy, which takes us back to profit interest as motivation, which is the core of the whole problem.
Individual solutions for sustainability are nice and good, I’m sure, and we can all sit in the shine of our low energy lamps and have a our consciences clean, but it’s far from enough since it’s the overproduction of all kinds of crap which is the real villain.
And that’s all because of profit interest, and the only way we can really achieve sustainability is to get rid of Capitalism!
For fuck’s sake!
The comic will be published in an upcoming issue of Bild & Bubbla.
Pretty sure I may have posted this here before, since I made it for AltCom last time it was an election year. Unfortunately these things never seem to get too old because the problem remains… So here we go again, a little something for this toxic election:
So, the question some of us are thinking about these days: Will AI replace human artists?
I think most people who make comics and other kinds of art don’t do it with getting rich as the motivation. We don’t even do it to get paid. Don’t get me wrong here: Getting paid for it is a way to be able to do it, it’s a way to make a living doing something you like, to have the time to do it. So it’s important in that way, it’s just not the main motivation. So even IF AI was used instead of human artists/illustrators/cartoonists, humans would still be making art. I know, because I’m doing it and I seldom get paid for the actual art (I get mostly indirect money like grants or by doing art-related projects etc, what I get from the actual comics/illustrations is often a pretty small part of my income).
And I believe that as long as people are making art, there will be an audience for it, because even if the AI can make beautiful images, there is more that goes into art, like individual artists’ experiences, thought processes, emotions, skills, personality. Even if an AI would become sentient and have all that, it’d be one among many. And as long as it doesn’t, it’s a tool to be used in the process of making art.
I just read a comic (Summer Island) written by Steve Coulson, a human, with art ”by” Midjourney, an AI. But the AI didn’t make the comic. The human fed it lines of text and (probably) got a huge number of results to choose from. So there are possibly hundreds of unused images that weren’t selected because they didn’t fit what the human wanted them to express. So it’s not really the artist, just like a pen isn’t a creator, or a brush or even Photoshop.
Sure, some potential employers would rather use an AI than pay someone to make illustrations, but they still need someone to wield it. And they probably would’ve paid as little as possible to a human artist anyway, or do the old ”you’re doing something you love so you don’t need money and besides, you get exposure isn’t that great”. This may sound hypocritical since I’m also working with a publisher that mostly hasn’t been able to pay for comics, but we do when we can, and no one is making money off anyone else’s work. Because it’s all non-profit (and pretty non-commercial), and the editors mostly don’t get paid either, and the artists know what they’re getting into and so on and so on and these days we’re actually paying at least a little.
Making it big in art is about knowing the right people, existing in the right social circles, being the right kind of social chameleon, being either born into the right family or being lucky. I don’t have that, so to me there’s no difference between an AI- or human-generated image being sold for $433K because in both cases it’s someone else making that money. Maybe that’s why I’m not worried about being replaced, because what are they going to take from me, my non-profit work? I’d be happy to be able to focus on my own comics instead. Just like most economic crises haven’t really affected me since I didn’t have a lot of money before or after the crises either…
People still listen to guitar music even though electronica exists. The problems with the music indistry are, as they have always been, not that people don’t listen to music or that no one makes music, but that music companies want to make a profit. Record companies always got more than the actual musicians, just as it is now with Spotify.
The problem, as always, is Capitalism, not the tools we use to make art.
The images in this post were made using Craiyon. Not to complain, but very few of these images are even close to what I would have done…
[Sorry for the language, English wil be back soon]
I posten igår:
SD skryter om att de minsann var först med att vara rasister och de andra partierna bara apar efter (som jag sagt tidigare: det är värdelöst att försöka ta röster från dem genom att haka på samma tåg, inte bara för att rasism är värdelöst utan också för att SD alltid kommer uppfattas som bättre på det) och skickar med ett kuvert med någon slags listor över olika rövhål (på kommunal, regional och riksnivå).
V skickar det mest utförliga valmaterialet av alla partier hittills. De ser ut att behålla positionen som det minst dåliga alternativet (iofs ingen stor bedrift). Det är bara synd att V har såna extrema åsikter, som att vården ska vara tillgänglig för alla, så inte ens sossarna kan samarbeta med dem utan hellre går till L som har gjort klart och tydligt att de hatar (bruna) 2-åringar och älskar (bruna) SD.
Eller den senaste grejen, att flera i V har synts med PKK-flaggor så S är alldeles till sig, för det är ju Turkiet som är de goda nu (förutom att de väl nästan är på väg att slängas ut ur NATO så vi borde inte ens behöva lyda allt Erdogan säger längre, om vi inte jättegärna vill. Vi har ju redan visat tydligt att vi inte tycker oss behöva hålla internationella löften). Det är som att S har glömt att vi terrorstämplade PKK för att vi var “tvungna”, inte för att vi ville.
Och ett paket med min Galagodebut (en sida Arg Kanin i Tecknaruppropet mot kärnvapen och Nato). Mycket fin! Det blir också en utställning med material ur boken på Galleri Mint i ABF-huset i Stockholm 1-4 sep så gå dit och kolla, ni som kan! Och köp boken! All vinst går till Svenska Freds.
So, my international friends, let’s talk a bit about #Swedengate.
First, what you need to understand is that in the international country, Sweden is very much a little backwards countryside community where we just discovered the internets.
We’re pretty well off now, which makes us think that we’re a bit better than most other communities, but we used to be poor not long ago. The secret is that we have some natural resources that others wanted (and we also managed to stay out of the big war, so when others needed to rebuild, we were happy to sell them building materials.
We used to be known for our almost socialist welfare system, but that was like 50-60 years ago. Around the same time, we were also known for our generous and welcoming attitude, because back then we needed people to come here and work. So we took in people from exotic places such as Italy, Finland and Yugoslavia, and some political refugees from Latin America. After a while, we kind of stopped doing that, but we kept and cultivated the self-image anyway. This was also around the same time we figured it was time to change the name of our institute for racial biology, and maybe stop forcefully sterilize poor people with mental health issues.
I say we used to be that way, a society where we took care of each other on an institutional level, where most of us were kind of (at least seemingly) on the same level. Now, however, our rich are getting richer and our poor are getting poorer at a pace more rapid than most other places.
We also make money selling guns to the bigger cities and we don’t really see a problem with that, because it’s a good thing to make money, right? That’s what you’re supposed to do and it’s what all the other kids are doing when they grow up.
So we used to have this cultural thing where families ate together and if other kids were visiting they were expected to eat with their own families later, so instead of giving them food they had to sit in the room and read comics or whatever. No one thought much about it because everyone did it like that, except the immigrant kids who weren’t used to it because they had perspectives and experiences that were a bit bigger than what we had in our backwards little town.
This was around the same time when our view of culture was also a bit backwards. It was frowned upon to listen to weird music like hip hop or techno, it was kind of frowned upon to read anything that wasn’t detective stories and you didn’t watch anything other than the most mainstream of Hollywood movies. While the rest of the world knew us for Ingemar Bergman, we viewed (and still kind of do) people who watched Bergman movies as stuck-up snobs who thought they were better than the rest of us.
And when something bad happened we tended to blame the out-of-towners.
We were visited once by a foreigner, a Chinese musician (I know I may have talked about this before, but it’s such a telling story) who was interviewed in one of our morning TV shows. When she got the question about how excited she was to have made music for such a big movie, she was kind of embarrased (not for herself so much as for the interviewer) because she had been doing huge concerts for years and that movie was just one job, and not the reason she was here. It’s quite possible that the interviewer, being kind of a journalist* in this small backwards countryside village, didn’t mean it as a belittling kind of racist comment. It’s more likely that he had just discovered that they actually make movies in China and (if he had even seen it himself) he was probably mightily impressed, and which one is China again, it’s the one with the samurais, right (whatever that means)? He probably wasn’t even aware that he maybe should have made a little more research before the interview because why would he need to know more than that she’d made music for one of the few Chinese movies that were good enough to be shown in Sweden (ok, kind of racist, but in a way he may not have been aware of)? Also, and I think this is important: the imagined audience for that morning TV show were ”normal Swedes”, i.e boomers who just recently heard of the internet (if they even heard about it at all), and who were a bit racist/ignorant, and you mustn’t scare them off by acting as if the world is bigger than their living room. I still get more or less that feeling when I watch morning TV, even now, 20 years later.
And when bad things happen, we still, embarrassingly, tend to blame the out-of-towners.
So that’s some of the context. It should be noted that not everyone did the ”let the kid’s friend wait in the room while we eat” thing, but enough did that it was a pretty common occurence. It would make more sense if it was a class thing (and maybe it was, originally?), but it seems to have been more widespread than that. It seems to have been more common in some areas than others, but it was pretty standard all over the country. It was, however, still possible to grow up without experiencing it, depending on what (more or less random) circles you grew up in. And it seems to have more or less stopped since the turn of the millennium, so the current international astonishment over this whole thing is about 20-30 years too late to be meaningful…
Edit: I was just made aware that Sweden is one of two(!)** countries that offers free lunch for school kids, so I guess the joke’s kind of on the rest of the world.
I mean, it doesn’t change anything I’ve said above, but it is something that most (as in: almost all of them) countries should do something about because it is pretty shameful.
Drawing of Swedish food with no additions from other cultures, by Kinga Dukaj.
—RECIPE—
How to cook a You can go sit in the room while we eat family dinner: Portions: exactly 1 family
Put 1 Dinner is the only real family time we have between work and TV (God probably told us that, back when we all believed in Him), just after he taught us the virtue of wage labor, 1 It’s your parents’ responsibility to feed you and 1 You can read comics while you wait or similar flavour into a bowl and stir until you get a Dinner’s ready (not for you)!
Boil in a bowl of Food is expensive until you feel that you’re Acting the proper Swedish way.
Season with some Let’s just pretend this is normal until it is, a spoonful of If you don’t feed my kids I’m not feeding yours, a bit of It’s just kids, they have no feelings anyway, remember when we used them in the mines and a pinch of If I feed your kid you may feel that you owe me and I wouldn’t want that to happen to me so I won’t subject you to it either.
You know that it’s almost ready when it smells like That’s simply how we do things here and you’re a weird foreigner for questioning it.
Let it simmer for approx. 20-30 years for an added taste of Who’d’ve thought this would ever come up and bite us in the ass?
Serve as an embarrasing Social media event.
* I should add that of course I can’t know the actual vews of this interviewer, and I’ve embellished/speculated a bit, so don’t take it as a critique of that individual but rather as a representation of the general sentiment in the Swedish mainstream. The movie in question was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon…
Nu är det ju lite sent och vårt enda hopp verkar ligga på Erdogan av alla rövhål till människor. Och/eller svenska politikers förmåga att ha integritet nog att inte sälja ut alla kurder i landet för att blidka honom. Men det är nog ungefär like troligt som att bara de som var för medlemskap kommer att behöva skicka ut sina egna barn i framtida NATO-krig. Den här Arg Kanin-bilden gjorde jag hursomhelst för inte så länge sedan till Tecknaruppropet Moment2022.
This post is in Swedish because it’s about Swedish politics (well, not only Swedish, since it’s about our membership in NATO). Normal transmissions will resume shortly. I translated the cartoon text but not the accompanying text.
Making a decision about whether to join NATO or not right now is a bit like going to shop for food when you’re really hangover hungry. Except what you’re buying isn’t food but war, and you’re not hungry but afraid, and you’re not hungover, only stupid. So what you risk returning home with isn’t too much food… …but a potential contribution to a new world war and then we all die.
Detta skrev jag i samband med att jag la upp bilden på Facebook, så det var ett tag sedan och situationen är lite annorlunda nu, men det enda som inte fortfarande är giltigt är sista meningarna eftersom folkomröstningståget redan har gått:
Kanske behöver jag förtydliga några saker om hur jag ser på hela den här grejen:
Att tycka att NATO inte borde ha försökt expandera genom att ta med Ukraina (innan kriget) och att ha en förståelse för att det av Ryssland kan tolkas som en aggression (typ Cuban missile crisis light) är inte ett försvar för Putins invasion av Ukraina. Inte heller är det att lägga skulden på någon annan än Rysslands ledning.
Borde Sverige göra någonting? Ja, men ska vi bidra inte bara humanitärt utan även med vapen så kanske vi inte måste skryta med det för att vinna politiska poäng utan vi kan göra det i smyg som antagligen andra länder har gjort, av rena säkerhetsskäl. Och vi kanske borde försöka se till att de vapnen inte hamnar i händerna på just ukrainska nazister.
Självklart ska vi ta emot flyktingar från Ukraina, precis som vi borde från andra länder, men inte för att “de är ungefär [kulturellt och etniskt] som vi” utan för att de behöver hjälp och det vore omänskligt att neka dem det. Precis som det är omänskligt att neka flyktingar från andra ställen.
Putin har aldrig varit annat än ond. Att hävda att vänstern stöttar honom är oärligt, särskilt när det kommer från folk som var för Trump även när han satt och tindrade med ögonen mot sin bästa diktatorvän/idol Putin. Redan innan den här invasionen drev han en gangsterkapitalism och krigade mot andra länder och stiftade monstruösa anti-HBTQ-lagar osv osv. Han har aldrig varit ok, men vissa hade mer överseende med de sakerna fram till anfallet mot Ukraina och de borde inte kasta sten i det glashuset genom falska anklagelser mot alla som inte älskar NATO.
Den offentliga debatten om hela grejen har också alldeles spårat ur, på ungefär samma sätt. Att ställa in en stödkonsert för Ukraina med motiveringen att det skulle användas ryska instrument är idiotiskt. Att ta bort kefir för att förpackningen hade Mokvareferenser är löjligt. Att överlag ge sig på random ryska individer och rysk kultur som inte har något med kriget att göra överhuvudtaget är galenskap, precis som när folk gav sig på random asiater för att COVID-19 först upptäcktes i Kina, eller random muslimer efter 9-11. Det är som att folk bara går och väntar på vilka lösa ursäkter som helst för att få bete sig rasistiskt. Och att intervjua random personer på gatan i Ryssland som uppenbarligen inte vågar uttala sig kritiskt mot Putin eller kriget är på inget sätt ett bevis för att alla ryssar är på hans sida. Rasismen blir ännu tydligare när ickevita ukrainare stoppas vid gränsen utan att det blir skandal, och vi fortsätter neka andra flyktingar som har minst lika starkt behov av skydd.
Är Sverige hotat av Ryssland? Jag kan inte se det. Visst, Putin är oberäknelig, men om han inte på riktigt planerar att ta över hela Europa och därigenom starta ett tredje världskrig så tror jag inte han bryr sig om oss. Möjligen om vi skulle gå med i NATO, så även vårt eget säkerhetsläge är ett argument mot att vi skulle gå med.
Ett medlemskap i NATO skulle också, som vissa påpekat, påverka Sveriges möjlighet att vara en alliansfri medlare i olika konflikter. Jag vet inte hur stor skillnad i praktiken det skulle göra, eller hur ofta/framgångsrikt vi har tagit den rollen på sistone, men det finns å andra sidan ingen anledning att se det här så kortsiktigt. Går vi med så påverkar det inte vår internationella roll bara just nu utan för lång tid framöver.
Nu är jag långt ifrån en utrikespolitisk expert så jag kan såklart ha fel om vissa saker som jag precis skrivit här. Jag har mest mitt eget logiska tänkande och de fakta jag plockat upp att gå efter, men ingenting i dagens debattklimat med skandalösa löpsedlar om Putins hemliga döttrar och artiklar som rakt av utgår från att ett medlemskap i NATO är oundvikligt och allmän krigshetsclickbaiting och (återigen) rasism säger mig att jag skulle ha mer fel än någon annan som väljer att uttala sig.
Så till sist: Borde vi ha en folkomröstning om medlemskap i NATO? Med tanke på hur opinionen verkar se ut just nu och hur extremt vinklad den offentliga debatten är (då menar jag självklart inte att vi borde se fler inlägg som försvarar Putin, men just debatten om NATO framställs ofta som att den frågan redan är avgjord och självklar) så vet jag inte hur mycket hopp jag har kring en sådan folkomröstning, MEN det vore extremt konstigt att inte ha en. Vi röstade om kärnkraften, EU-medlemskapet och EMU och med tanke på hur stor förändring ett medlemskap i NATO skulle innebära så bör vi rimligen få rösta även om det.
The following message was found in the ruins of the Earth civilization that ended with the Sixth Mass Extinction. Converted from what was called “the internet”, an archaic means of communication that was widespread at the time, this archaeological find is included in the collection “Earth; how did it all end? Clues and ruminations”:
Did you know that COVID-19 isn’t actually contagious the way we’ve been lead to believe? The virus is in fact spread through vaccinations. Which means this is a plan that’s been prepared and slowly implemented during much of the 20th century. It’s easy to figure out because that’s the period during which most of the now afflicted got their vaccinations as children. Whoever did this against humanity have enormous resources, based on the fact that they’ve managed to do this globally and over such an amount of time, not to speak of the meticulous planning necessary to activate it just now, in 2019/2020 when 5G technology created the right amount of background radiation for the latent virus to be activated.
So who has resources on that level? There is at least one organisation who, for centuries and on a global scale, has managed to trick most of humanity into believing that the Earth is a globe, in spite of the overwhelming evidence proving it’s actually flat. The name of that organisation is NASA. It is quite possible, even probable, that they are agents of the reptile race living in the hollow places beneath the surface of the flat Earth. Reptiles who disguise themselves as the political, financial and cultural elites of the world, controlling our lives for generation after generation, possibly for millennia. They get their powers from the blood of human children, sexually violated in Satanic rituals. Power they use to control our destiny and, sometimes, to turn frogs gay for some reason.
If you’ve ever felt that your life didn’t turn out the way you had envisioned, that’s them. If you’re wondering why there is war, poverty and starvation, that’s them. Some people would say that the fault lies in systems of economy, such as Capitalism, but it’s more realistic to assume those theories are planted by the reptiles themselves as a way of diverting our attention from the real truth. We know that Capitalism is the best way for humans to fulfill their potential, through competition and with profit as the driving force. It is after all what human nature dictates, and not at all like the hunger for power that drives the lizards and fuels their conspiracies to keep us down.
The probable origin of these reptiles is Nibiru, the tenth planet, which will soon return to what is commonly called the solar system, passing close to the Earth as it has done before on its long, elliptical orbit around the sun.
The “Sun”, however, is actually a lamp moving according to pre-set patterns across the sky, a few hundred meters (or possibly kilometers) above ground. That’s why they don’t want you to stare directly into it, because they’re afraid you might see it for what it really is.
That the pandemic broke out when it did might very well be because so many people started to find out about the truth, in spite of corrupt institutions like the education system or the old-school news media. We lost those struggles a long time ago, but the internet has given us a new weapon. The US military, who developed the internet, is an institution that has somehow managed to resist for a long time, but it has now also been infiltrated, another victim of the Gay Agenda. However, through various YouTube channels, chatrooms and other social media, we’ve been able to wake up a lot of people to what’s going on behind our backs.
Leading the brave resistance from his golden throne is Donald Trump, a man of the people who got rich by being chosen by God as the defender of freedom, decency and humanity itself, his riches trickling down to save the rest of us. He’s leading a movement of underdogs against hordes of traitorous politicians, fake news media and the Cultural Marxist elites, supported by antifascists who are themselves more or less nazis. After all, Hitler was a socialist or it wouldn’t be in the name of his ideology. Already in the 1980s, the fake news channels could sense Trump’s coming ascension, the great threat to the status quo, the manliest of men and most intelligent of smartbrains. Since back then, they’ve run an ongoing smear campaign, portraying him as a supervillain in the news as well as in movies produced by a Hollywood run by communists, liberals and other factions of the left, not to mention the satanists. He even had to develop his own brand of glossolalia to get past their censors, a language that is clearly understood by those who are sufficiently developed but sounds like gibberish to anyone else. That’s how he could move below the radar and grab the presidential power by the pussy with his great big hands.
As soon as the election scandal in the US has been solved and he is returned to the seat of power [something that may already have happened as you read this], he will surely save us from both the “pandemic” and the reptiles, queers, blacks and socialists. Then we will finally be free from our shackles of forced ignorance and cancel culture.
Not to mention the Jews who not only run the world by owning banks and corporations but also by instigating the invasion of the West by muslims who are slowly replacing white Europeans who should rightfully rule the world through their superior genes that are now being bred out of existence. Within possibly as little as 20 years, muslims will have completely replaced the whites, ruling through sharia, taking out ham from school lunches and possibly meat in general, leaving only halal-slaughtered vegan food and vegetable-based beer to further weaken the male population. Soy products have already killed the testosterone in so many men that soon, maybe as soon as 2030, half the planetary population will be gender-neutral trans people.
Transsexuals, a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in nature (just look at the seals, have you ever seen a male seal dressed in female clothes? Didn’t think so), are men who go through “corrective” surgery in order to infiltrate girls’ locker rooms. Our only hope in that arena may be that their perversions are at odds with the feminists who want to murder all men. With any luck they will kill each other, but more realistic prognoses say that they will band together along with the pedophile Satanists to crush normal society.
The problem is that women can’t use swords. In stark contrast to the indoctrination spread through various TV series, it is physically impossible for females to use that kind of weaponry. A sword might weigh as much as a few kilos, so it takes a man’s superior musculature and mental strength to lift and do any damage with it. This is why feminists developed other, more devious methods. They’ve completely taken over previously apolitical franchises like Star Wars and Marvel and replaced all the main characters with female, over-powered versions. These stories which used to be neutral tales of relatable heroism have now been turned into completely unrealistic depictions of dystopian worlds where women rule everything. Which is of course also what they are trying to do in real life.
But there is hope. There are clues throughout popular culture to open our eyes and expose the true enemy, the reptiles of the Illuminati. You may see hand signals or zoomed-in eyes in music videos, or phrases in movies that get a new meaning when taken out of context. These are either signs from cultural resistance fighters or subliminal messages from the Illuminati themselves, so watch out! Some of these artists are part of the agenda, so if you’re not sure that someone is already on the right side of history, you better stay away or you risk becoming another victim of their brainwash.
There are also resistance cells under the indirect leadership of brave men like Zack Snyder and others who are inexhaustibly exposing cases of infiltration by the agenda. It’s a constant struggle, like when they replaced Snyder with Joss Whedon in order to destroy the Justice League movie. However, that was a fight they didn’t win, as armies of online freedom fighters not only managed to get The Snyder Cut released but are also spreading awareness of multiple cases where women and people of color have taken over. They’ve bravely alerted us when previously great superhero comics turned bad because of shoehorned agendas, or when video games have abandoned the true fans who made game culture great. White boys are now completely left without any cultural safe spaces and are probably the most forgotten group in media culture as well as society in general.
This is how white men was turned into the endangered species they are today, with hardly any power or influence left in society. Now, after the Police have suddenly, out of the blue, been criticized and can no longer do their job properly because their hands are tied by red tape, we stand almost completely without protection. It’s what countless action movies have warned us about, but they were made by white men so no one listened, of course. Almost 90% of non-whites commit more or less all crime, so what are we to do when the Police are no longer allowed to execute the enemy on the streets, even if they catch someone driving a car or refusing to obey every single order? Unjustified or not, orders are orders and should be obeyed or law enforcement risks losing all legitimacy.
By the way, did you know that there were also white slaves and black people were responsible for almost all slavery in history, until Trump abolished it by separating invading Mexican families and also terrorism? So there is no reason at all to complain about racism because it doesn’t exist anymore and who are the real racists anyway? Except reverse racism against white people, which is real, but we’re not allowed to talk about that.
There are many more examples, but now you can hopefully see clearly how it’s all connected and how we must all do our best to make sure that incels can finally sleep with all the girls they want, for equality. As George Orwell said in the alt-right bible, 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a pink boot stamping on the white man’s face—forever”. Be like Neo in The Matrix: take the red pill so you can see the truth: men are men and women are immigrants and it’s all cultural Marxism.
Although the exact circumstances surrounding the fall of human civilization on Earth remain unclear, this is one of the few remaining documents from the era. Scholars believe it to be a good representation of the everyday concerns of the time and may contain crucial clues as to why the collapse happened. Note that these clues may be found more in the existence of the text rather than its contents.
I chose to publish this text in its complete form here, because I can. CBA vol 53 also includes a comic I made, but if you want to read that you’ll have to get the book (link in the beginning of this post). I’ll just give you a small sample here:
I should also mention that the After the Ends of the World concept is something I’ve worked further with in the books with the same name, by me and Susanne Johansson. Current day issues looked at from a future where they were the reason everything collapsed. Part humor, part warning signal… Both books 1 and 2 are available from Hybriden (and from the regular internet bookstores in Sweden).
Den Onödiga Flyktingkrisen (The Unnecessary Refugee Crisis) (Migra förlag) has come from the printer!
My contribution to this book is that I made some interior illustrations and they used a color version of one of them for the back cover. So I havenät been very involved in it, but it feels like an extremely important book right now.
I do have some reservations to the perspective of parts of it, that it focuses on the years since 2015 which may misrepresent the situation before that, but they also acknowledge that in some chapters of the book, so that’s ok. It’s nothing that should dissuade anyone from reading it.
Release events are coming up. I may go to the one in Lund if I can make it. Check out the event scheduleand ordering information at onodigaflyktingkrisen.se.
Here are a couple of my illustrations:
And a bonus one that didn’t make it into the book:
My latest published work is an illustration in Ordfront Magasin #3/2021, a special issue about the current state of migration policies in Sweden.
(Click image to see bigger version)
The title of the article translates as “Six years of cruelty”, which refers to the changed policies since the “Syrian refugee crisis” back in 2015. Earlier that year, the Swedish prime minister said that he wants to live in a Europe that is open and helpful when people are in need. In the fall, after a few months of massive refugee immigration, he chose to close the borders. They also “temporarily” stopped most permanent permits of residence, while temporary permits are the norm, along with other restrictions making it harder to pass an application for asylum. “Temporarily” in quotations, because that rule is still active 6 years later and we’re not expected to be going back to normal for a while, if ever. A new law that was passed June 22 of 2021, they made things even harsher. For example, they now have a list of “safe countries” from which asylum applications can be denied with a minimum of deliberation. Which would be hard to combine with the rule that you need individual cause when you apply, but I guess it’s easy if the main goal is to deny asylum for as many as possible and everything else is secondary.
So let’s talk about the normal. Because I’ve seen this 6 year thing mentioned a few times now, and it always bugs me. The text goes on to describe how the whole asylum process has become worse. How asylum decisions are arbitrary, how translators sometime don’t even know the language they’re supposed to interpret but the interviews carry on anyway, how cases are decided without even being thoroughly researched, how lawyers who are supposed to represent the interests of asylum seekers don’t take their jobs seriously etc etc. And I’m sure things have become much worse after the laws were changed BUT all these things were true even before 2015.
I understand the need to really look at the current situation and look at how the laws and practices have become much worse in the last few years. But I also think there is a danger in pretending that if we just go back to the situation as it was in 2014, things would be good again. Because they weren’t.
The illustration I made, representing the migration process as a sort of lottery, was inspired not by what’s happened recently but by how it’s been as far back as I’ve had any kind of insight into the whole thing.
Twenty years ago, we protested against the “refugee storage facilities” (flyktingförvar), as detention centres for asylum seekers are dehumanizingly called in Swedish. People had to hide refugees who weren’t allowed to stay but were desperate not to go back to where they came from. Refugee children were apathetic and mentally unreachable from hopelessness and fear. We were protesting what was called Fortress Europe. Sweden sent money and personnel to Frontex, the EU joint border patrol project designed to keep the unwanted out of Europe. Scientifically dubious age assessments were used to deem children to be older than 18 in order to be able to deport them easier without having to (on paper) violate any UN conventions. Ten years ago, we were protesting mass deportations to Iraq and Afghanistan, basically active warzones. Palestinians who has been without a country to return to, in some cases for their entire lives, were hungerstriking outside the Swedish Migration Agency in hopes that they would be listened to and finally be allowed to have a place to call home. Various government agencies were cooperating with the Police to hunt for undocumented immigrants in special projects that used racial profiling to find the ones they were looking for. And none of these things are over. None of them are things of the past, even if the names and methods change slightly, but they are also not things of only these last seven years of even more monstrous policies. And if this is how we treat refugees, it’s gonna be even worse for non-refugee migrants.
The neofascist/ultra conservative/nationalist party Sverigedemokraterna haven’t grown to become Sweden’s third biggest party as a response to Sweden being overrun by hordes of foreign rapists, as they would describe it. They’ve grown in a climate where the “normal” parties have pursued increasingly restrictive migration policies for the last 30 years or so, lending normalcy to anti-immigrant sentiments simply by realizing those sentiments through laws and governmental praxis.
Arbitrary and legally insecure are definitely words to describe the current state of the migration system, and it needs to change. As it has been for a long time, it’s just extra worse right now.
Anyway, if you want to know more (and if you read Swedish), go get the latest issue of Ordfront Magasin. Even if the “six years” rhetoric makes me angry, it is something that needs to be talked about from perspectives other than the currently dominating “immigrants are the cause of all crime and terrorism and all the other bad things” delusion.
Another one in Swedish, mostly becaue I’ll be linking to articles in Swedish. Sorry for that, but I promise the next one will be in English as usual…
Just nu vet jag inte vad som händer, för jag såg precis att Centerpartiet har backat om marknadshyrorna. Eller jag menar den fria hyressättningen för nyproducerade lägenheter. Och för nyrenoverade lägenheter (och så småningom för alla, men det får vi inte prata högt om för det skulle bli en överraskning).
Det finns också andra som kan de här frågorna bättre än jag, så jag tänkte låta dem prata lite, men även om det är så verkar det finnas en del riktigt stora plot holes i den offentliga debatten kring detta. Kan det kanske vara för att många som skriver/pratar om det själva har en hög eller åtminstone ganska bekväm inkomst och bor i bostadsrätter och därför inte har koll på verkligheten för många av oss som skulle drabbas? Kanske är det för att det finns en utbredd fobi mot allt som luktar vänster?
För visst känns det som att det finns nästan en desperation i hur Vänsterpartiet hela tiden måste nedvärderas, misstänkliggöras och oskadliggöras i all offentlig debatt? Nästan som att deras ideologi skulle kunna utgöra ett verkligt hot mot den enda vägens nyliberala politik om folk börjar ta dem på allvar.
Men om vi bortser från partipolitiken en stund… Här är några saker som många verkar glömma/ha svårt att förstå/inte bry sig om: – Det är inte “betalningsvilja” som hindrar folk från att betala en hyra som kanske går upp med 40% jämfört med hur det ser ut idag. Många av oss har helt enkelt inte råd. Vi har inte tillräcklig hög inkomst, inget undanlagt kapital, ingen möjlighet att plötsligt välja att tjäna mycket mer pengar. Har man ett par tusen kvar varje månad efter att hyra och andra nödvändiga räkningar är betalda så är det inte så lätt, och de som verkar tro det har antagligen inte behövt räkna i huvudet när de går och handlar mat för att veta vad de har råd med. – Samma sak spelar in i “valet” att bo i hyresrätt istället för bostadsrätt, för den som tror att det kunde vara en utväg. För att kunna ta lån behöver man en viss nivå av inkomst. Och äger man en lägenhet stängs man ute från en del sociala skyddsnät. Om man ser det som en sista men kanske nödvändig utväg att söka försörjningsstöd så får man inte äga en lägenhet. – Det verkar också finnas någon utopisk tro på att om man inte kan betala hyran så kan man flytta till något billigare, men det är svårt nog att hitta redan nu, och kommer inte direkt bli lättare om alla hyror går upp. – Att tvingas flytta från sitt hem är inget som någon vill. Det gäller även de som tvingas på grund av ekonomiska orsaker.
Nu när jag skriver detta förstår jag inte riktigt varför jag behöver säga sådana här självklarheter, men jag har också träffat folk som inte verkar kunna förstå att det finns de som har ekonomiska problem helt enkelt bara genom att försöka leva.
Dan Hallemar skrev en rätt bra text i Expressen om den historiska kampen kring hyresrätterna. Nu är den artikeln typiskt nog låst, men här är några citat:
En av de viktigaste sociala rörelserna i Sverige i början på 1900-talet var den som kom från hyresgäster som blev vräkta från sina hem. I församlingarna på Södermalm i Stockholm vräktes vid den här tiden i genomsnitt 600 människor från sina bostäder varje år. Detta på grund av att hyressättningssystemet var helt fritt, utsattheten enorm. 1917 röstade riksdagen med bred majoritet fram hyrestegringslagen och besittningsrätten. Beslutet garanterade hyresgästerna en högsta hyra samt att den som hade en bostad skulle få behålla den. Alla hyreshöjningar skulle godkännas och alla uppsägningar skulle kontrolleras av kommunala hyresnämnder. Hyresregleringen upphörde 1923 mitt under en kraftig lågkonjunktur. De hade setts som tillfälliga krisåtgärder. Hyresgästerna var åter lämnade till fastighetsägarnas godtycke.
(…)
Hyresrätten blev det viktigaste medlet för att uppnå [en generell bostadspolitik som skulle höja alla medborgares bostadsstandard, även de med dålig ekonomi], genom de allmännyttiga bostadsbolagen. Tillsammans med den unika – och fram till 1969 priskontrollerade – bostadsrätten började den sociala bostadspolitiken formas. De senaste trettio åren har man gjort vad man har kunnat för att vrida klockan tillbaka till den glödande askans år 1923.
För det finns också en oerhörd kraft – ja ilska – i att bostadsfrågan börjat formuleras, precis som då. Den har ofta tagit form som aktivism, som den rörelse mot utförsäljningen av hyresrätter som Nooshi Dadgostar drog i gång 2012 under parollen ”Alby är inte till salu”. Det här är en kamp som förs över hela Europa.
(…)
Tänk om alla vi som bor i hyresrätt inte är det statarboskap som ni trodde att vi var, tänk om vi också har hem som vi vill bo kvar i, tänk om vi inte är en del i en möjlig flyttkedja som ni funderat ut utan länkade till den plats som vi bor på. Trots att vi inte äger det hem som vi varje dag låser upp dörren till? Tänk om det hemmet, den nyckeln – den idén om ett hem för oss som aldrig hade råd att vara kvar på den där marknaden – också är ett samhälles idé om att de som inte har råd, de unga, de nyskilda, de som just kommit hit, de som pensionerats med låg pension ska ha råd med en bostad.
Sedan har vi de partipolitiska turerna i riksdagen de här senaste dagarna. Tror det finns en rätt bra sammanfattning på Erik Wiklunds blog. Han pratar om partipolitiska kompromisser och ännu några blinda fläckar som kan bero på hur olika politiker ser på sin yrkesroll:
Den här eliten har så klart också sina företrädare i Sveriges riksdag. Partier för vilka politiken inte finns till för alla oss som lever i samhället, utan för att upprätthålla vissa ekonomiska logiker och transaktioner. Det är det här som gång på gång kallas “förnuftigt” och “balanserat”, det är det här som är “mitten” och att vara emot det är att vara en orealistisk drömmare. Ingen socialdemokrat skulle formulera sin politiska vision på det här viset, men de kan samtidigt inte föreställa sig någonting annat. Striden om marknadshyror sker mot bakgrund av nya skandaler och avslöjanden kopplade till den djupt impopulära men i hög utsträckning politiskt döda frågan om rätten för privata företag att tjäna pengar på vård, skola och omsorg. Den här rätten för en liten elit att ta för sig av resurser som tillhör det gemensamma och samhällets mest resurssvaga är så klart den centrala komponenten både i vad liberaler försvarar med vinster i välfärden, och i vad de kämpar för med marknadshyror. Med stor möda förmåddes Socialdemokraterna förra mandatperioden att presentera ett förslag på hur vinsterna skulle kunna begränsas, men efter Januariavtalet står Vänsterpartiet ensamt i den striden.
Frågan nu är väl vad det innebär att januariavtalet ska omförhandlas, för C lär ju vilja ha något annat i utbyte nu när de inte fick detta. Som typ inskränkt strejkrätt eller slopad LAS eller något annat sätt att spotta oss i ansiktet. Tur att S aldrig skulle gå med på något av det. För det skulle de väl inte? Eller?
